


more than kin (and less than kind)

by rain_sleet_snow



Series: classified? i know all about that [2]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Canon-Implied Violence, Gen, Implied/Referenced Brainwashing, Jakku, Kylo Ren is Not Nice, Loyalty, Memory Alteration, Minor Character Death, Original Trilogy as History, Planet Naboo (Star Wars), Prequel, Rey Nobody, The Dark Side of the Force, Young Rey
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-03
Updated: 2018-04-03
Packaged: 2019-04-17 23:55:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,278
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14200398
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rain_sleet_snow/pseuds/rain_sleet_snow
Summary: How an orphan abandoned to the Second Jedi Temple became Rey of Niima Outpost.





	more than kin (and less than kind)

**Author's Note:**

> Trying to make the Rey Nobody theory work in my head. With thanks to brynnmclean for a great deal of encouragement!

There were a thousand girls called Breha, and most of them had Alderaanian parents, but only one of them had been left at the Jedi Temple as a baby. Ben’s uncle had tried to reason with the parents, explain that there was no need for the little girl to study at the Temple just yet, they didn’t have to give her up, they could have help and support to keep her with them -  
  
The father had recognised Ben, lurking awkwardly in a corner. Anyone who remembered the Organas well enough to name their daughter after Queen Breha would have done. He had pushed the baby into Ben’s arms, and Ben had almost dropped her.  
  
Ben had waited and waited while Uncle Luke made use of every shred of persuasion and reason available. None of those shreds wove into an argument Breha’s parents would accept. By the time they walked away, weariness had settled over Uncle Luke’s face, and Breha had wet herself and started to grizzle. Ben hadn’t dared to move.  
  
There were a thousand girls called Breha, and most of them had Alderaanian parents. Only one of them had been left at the Jedi Temple as a baby. Only that one survived its destruction.  
  
Ben knew, later - while there was still more than a teaspoonful of Ben left to go around Kylo Ren’s massive frame - that it might have been kinder to let Snoke’s henchmen kill her right then. But when Breha crawled from the wreckage of her dormitory and someone turned a blaster on her, Ben first ordered him not to and then killed him when he didn’t listen. He picked Breha up and handed her to Tamé, who passed her hand over the child’s eyes and let a fine thread of Force suggestion carry her to sleep.  
  
Breha’s bereaved screaming finally stopped. Her tears did not.

 

“What are we going to do, Ben?” Tamé murmured. Her hands were trembling as her fingers stroked over Breha’s fine brown hair. “Rey is - Rey’s only a baby.”

 

The Second Jedi Temple, on a largely rural planet in the Chandrila system, was at least an hour on a fast speeder from the nearest settlement - and they would be too afraid to come and see what the smoke had been. Snoke’s mercenaries, and Ben’s classmates, had struck too quickly for a distress call to be sent out; Ben’s former neighbours would need to call in to the regional centre, and they would probably call through to Hanna City in the centre of the system. No-one would get here for at least a day, and Breha - though promisingly powerful - was only four.

 

As Tamé had said, a baby. A baby Lord Snoke would be delighted to make the acquaintance of.

 

 _No_ , Ben thought, and told himself it was jealousy. He was easily stronger than any of the others, but if Breha’s raw power was well honed, she might grow into a rival.

 

He could kill her. Or permit one of the henchmen to kill her. They would certainly do so if he tried to leave her behind.

 

“Bring her,” Ben said, turning away. “Don’t dawdle. We have a detour to make on Lord Snoke’s orders, and punctuality is the least of our duties to his lordship.”

 

His voice sounded flat and lifeless to his own ears.

 

Tamé refused to relinquish custody of Breha, once on the ship, though Ben had warned her she would be punished for it. She would allow him to be in their presence, and Ben knew immediately that that instinctive trust would be used against all three of them. Anyone else who came close got a glare that was more than half deranged, and Tamé’s free hand flashing towards her lightsabers.

 

Tamé was ambidextrous, and an exceptional duellist with either hand. No-one troubled her. And Ben couldn’t fault her logic; Snoke’s mercenaries looked on Breha as if she were a toy they were being denied, and Oless and Maroth were watching Breha in ways Ben didn’t trust. They would have killed Breha as easily as they’d killed thirty other younglings they’d grown up with.

 

“You will need to cut your braid,” Ben said, when they had almost reached Jakku. The ship smelled powerfully of burned hair, and pairs of silka beads lay scattered in corners, as if tossing them carelessly away was a sign of greater faith. Tamé was the only one with a braid still intact.

 

“Yes,” Tamé said, glancing at Breha and her lightsaber and her braid as if she wasn’t sure how to manage all three. There was a dull, unfocused look in her brown eyes, and there were patches of sweat under her arms and on her back. She had sat down with Breha and barely moved for the nine-hour flight, wrapping Breha’s hair into tiny buns, rocking the sleeping child, dozing with Breha on her lap.

 

“Give the child to me,” Ben ordered.

 

Tamé hesitated, but only momentarily. Her sleep command on Breha still held; the child was warm and solid in Ben’s arms, her thumb plugging her mouth, her face soft with dreaming. Guilt and shame swamped him for what he planned to do; but it was no worse, and indeed a great deal better, than his previous actions.

 

In her current state, Tamé would not forgive him, but that wasn’t necessary.

 

Tamé lit her lightsaber and caught her braid between her fingertips, staring at it vacantly. Appearances were important to the Naboo, Ben remembered, even if hair didn’t hold quite the same weight as it had once done on Alderaan - as it still did for his mother. Part of the reason the ship smelled quite so strongly of burned hair was that Ben had cut most of his hair off, not just his padawan braid.

 

Tamé closed her eyes and cut her padawan braid. She almost took her ear with it, and a surge of distress ran through her subdued Force presence as the braid hit the floor.

 

Lying against Ben’s chest, Breha whimpered.  Ben scowled at Tamé. “Don’t wake her.”

 

“I’m sorry, Ben,” Tamé murmured. Her Force presence had damped back down again, but her eyes were a little wild, and her hands were shaking as she held them out for Breha.

 

Ben handed her the child, and watched as Tamé huddled in on herself around the girl, pressing her face close to Breha’s head, singing something Ben recognised vaguely as a Nubian lullaby. She was badly off-key, and hoarse.

 

Tamé had balked at killing the children, Ben remembered. He had found it wasteful himself, had thought instead to wipe all their memories or replace them with false ones; but Oless had broken the joists on the younglings’ dormitory before he could enforce a more time-consuming solution.

 

He waited until they landed to take Breha from her. “I am going to collect an artefact Lord Snoke requires,” he said coolly, and directed his next words at the mercenaries. “I will take four of you and no-one else.”

 

Tamé lifted her head.

 

“She will be safe with me,” Ben said, making his voice colder. _You are drawing attention, Tamé_. “Do not ask questions.”

 

Tamé kept her mouth shut.

 

Several of his former classmates bowed to him on the way out. Bile rose in his throat and disdain in his mind; at least two of them were trying to work out how best to supplant him. Ben nodded to them coolly, and hitched Breha higher on his shoulder as he strode out into the grey light of a Jakku dawn. Hulking shapes looked before him, whispering with death; the Empire’s graveyard. Ben followed a trail of the Force’s making into the sands, questing for the object that called for him, and only distantly aware of anything else, including the way Breha was stirring in his arms, and her faint but persistent whimpering. It increased in volume as he scrambled through the wreckage, the mercenaries following after him, and after a while one of them walked up to stand at his left shoulder - with insufficient deference, and far too close to Breha.

 

“One of us could shut the kid up for you,” he offered.

 

“That won’t be necessary,” Ben replied, still flat and cold. Just up ahead, a quick jump away, lay the wreckage of an admiral’s cabin - and the holocron that had waited patiently here for decades.

 

“She’s -”

 

Ben reached out with the Force and crushed all four mercenaries’ hearts. He heard the thuds and crashes of their falling bodies with indifference, and spared his only kindness for soothing Breha when she let out an uncertain sob.

 

 _Sleep_ , he murmured softly, easing Breha back into dreams, and then gathered his strength and leapt into the ruined suite, making for a cracked and damaged cabinet.

 

The presence of the holocron in his pocket made Breha cry in her sleep again, but silently. Ben made his way back to the planetside skimmer they had used without undue haste, and laid Breha on one of the seats in a nest made of his cloak.

 

The ship had been landed near a settlement hardly worthy of the name, a scavengers’ marketplace called Niima Outpost. Ben went straight there, ignoring stares and rewarding an attempt to steal the speeder with a lightsaber blow that cut the thief in half, and selected the most powerful of the scavenger bosses and the most vicious. It was not difficult. There were only a few, and only this one was marked for survival.

 

Before he entered Unkar Plutt’s presence, he paused, and enacted the second part of his plan.

 

Breha was so small: he laid his hand over her forehead and her face disappeared under his palm. And though strong, she was unpractised and trusting. When Ben pushed past her shields and began a systematic burnout of her memory, she protested, but she did not try to fight him until it was too late. It wasn’t difficult to overpower her. He almost wished it had been.

 

One day, she’d need a teacher.

 

One day.

 

He waved Unkar Plutt’s hired thugs aside with a quick, brutal mind-trick, and strode into the presence.

 

“This girl,” he said, presenting her to the scavenger. “She is now your… ward. Keep her safe and alive.”

 

Unkar Plutt peered at Breha, limp and murmuring fretfully in Ben’s arms. “Why? She looks half dead.”

 

“That’s none of your concern. And she isn’t. She will wake soon.” Ben pulled a credit chip from his pocket. An emergency stash: his father had given it to him years ago, as if it meant anything other than guilt. “This for your trouble. If she’s alive in ten years I’ll double it.”

 

In ten years, Ben reasoned, if he lived, he would have killed Snoke and taken his rightful place; and Breha, if she lived, would be the perfect age for a padawan. Perhaps if Tamé survived that long, and if she proved her loyalty, he could reward her by sending her to bring Breha back into the fold.

 

Plutt took the credit chip and squinted at it, turning it over in the harsh sunlight, testing it in a machine. His undersized eyes turned bulbous as he saw the readout; Han Solo’s guilt came at a high price.

 

“Corellian,” he said at last, and squinted at Ben just the same way as he had at the credit chip. “What are you doing all the way out here, high roller?”

 

Ben let the question die unanswered as he focussed on the Force around him, creating a slow, unnatural rise in pressure and drop in temperature and watching the fear overtake Plutt, muddying the scavenger’s Force presence. It was satisfying to see, and Ben didn’t bother to stifle his smile.

 

“If I or my servants return at any point in the next ten years and find her dead or sickening due to your negligence,” Ben said, feeling his arms tighten around Breha, “there will be _no_ mercy. I hope I am clear.”

 

“Yes, Lord,” Plutt muttered, bowing his head.

 

Ben laid Breha down on a rough workbench under Plutt’s canopy, the only item of furniture. Presumably Plutt’s supplicants and subordinates weren’t encouraged to sit, and Plutt needed to be mobile to defend himself from rivals’ attacks.

 

“Her name is Rey,” Ben said, taking Tamé’s nickname for the girl. ‘Breha’ would attract attention, so far out of Core or Rebellion-affiliated space, and given that Lord Snoke knew that Ben would have stopped on Jakku it would make it exceptionally easy to find her. ‘Rey’ could fight for her life in anonymity, safe from Snoke. “You will tell her nothing of this day.”

 

Plutt gave a tiny jerk of his head, accepting the order. Ben frowned - he had chosen ‘vicious’ to keep Breha safe, but Plutt was also untrustworthy.

 

“ _Nothing_ ,” he repeated, and laid a command in his words, grabbing the flabby meat of Plutt’s arm and digging his fingers brutally into the muscle beneath when Plutt flinched and pulled away.

 

“Nothing,” Plutt echoed reluctantly, looking at Ben with hate in his face.

 

“Guard her,” Ben said, and released him. “I will be watching.”

 

“Understood, Lord,” Plutt said sullenly.

 

He did not look back when he left, or when he felt Breha stirring, shaking off the sleep he had wound her in. Tamé was waiting for him on the ramp, her eyes dim and the elaborate hairstyle she had still been wearing when she’d run out of her room to fight with him gone. She must have unwound the network of braids around her bun and then cut the hair off in even sections; although her hair was far tidier than his it was just as short and smelled as strongly of burning.

 

Her range was limited, he realised. She did not know that he had not killed Breha; he knew only that Breha did not return with him.

 

“Breha,” she said.

 

“I took necessary action,” Ben said coldly. “Do not question my decisions.”

 

Grief rolled outwards in waves from Tamé - grief become anger. Useful, if it wasn’t turned on him.

 

 _You know what would have happened to her_ , he said, directly to her mind.

 

There was a long pause, in which all the tortures that might have befallen a Force-sensitive child of such power flashed through Tamé’s mind, and consequently through Ben’s. Grief overmastered anger, and then slowly rage welled back up into its place: rage at Lord Snoke, as the ultimate cause of their inability to keep Breha safe.

 

Oh, she would serve his lordship for the sake of her skin - but she would serve Ben first, for Breha’s.

 

 _You are merciful_ , Tamé replied.

 

“Kneel before me.” His words were soft and dark, uttered without even a faint hint of Force-laden compulsion, but Tamé dropped to her knees without hesitation.

 

“You are the first of the Knights of Ren,” he told her, tilting her face up so her reddened eyes met his. “Your loyalty will be rewarded fittingly, and your treachery likewise. You will walk beside me in the darkest places and together we will draw blood and victory. Your fate will be mine and mine will be yours. This I swear.”

 

It was not a Sith’s oath; it came, in fact, direct from the warrior queens and handmaidens of Naboo. He would have preferred a vow of Darth Vader’s, but history did not record his words, only his deeds. It was unsatisfactory, but there it was.

 

Tamé’s eyes dilated as she recognised the form of the oath, and when she smiled there was blood on her teeth. Ben changed his mind about whether the oath was unsatisfactory or not.

 

“My blood and life are yours,” Tamé answered. “This I swear.”

 

She rose and followed him up the gangplank, where the leader of Snoke’s mercenaries met him with the business end of a blaster.

 

“Where are my men, you brat?” he snarled, with the licking and hissing characteristic of his species.

 

Ben raised an eyebrow as Tamé’s sabre snapped into life, its verdant green blade hovering just beneath the Trandoshan’s chin.

 

“Do not question my lord’s decisions,” Tamé said, ice-cold.

 

“Can it, Jedi bitch, this is _my ship_ -”

 

They left his body on the surface of Jakku with the other four mercenaries. Having seen the scavengers, Ben did not think their corpses would remain to incriminate them for long.

 

From the atmosphere of Jakku, he could still hear Breha - no, Rey - standing on the sands of Niima Outpost, screaming.

  


Tamé survived six of the ten years Ben had set himself as a deadline, and died on the surface of one of Bestine’s neighbouring moons, with a lightsaber wound in her gut. The hunt for the last of the Jedi affiliated with Luke Skywalker’s New Jedi Order required patience and perseverance, the leads few and tenuous, but this one had been accurate. Unfortunately, the zabrak spacer on the other end of the lead had also been accurate. Even Tamé’s superior duelling skills had been insufficient.

 

The rank smell of charred intestine hung heavy in the air; when Kylo Ren removed her helmet, Tamé’s face was twisted with agony and approaching death, her heavily scarred cheeks pale. He pulled off her glove to clasp her remaining hand and pushed pain away from her. A reward for his most faithful servant, and an acceptance that he would grieve her loss. She had killed four of the Knights who had aspired to supplant him; he had had to order her aside so he could finish the fifth himself.

 

“I never asked,” she choked, through blood in her mouth. “What you did with Breha.”

 

Kylo weighed up the costs and benefits of telling the truth, and the last remaining threads of Ben won. “I paid a scavenger to watch over her. I took her memories and gave her a new name.”

 

“Good,” Tamé breathed, a faint joy on her lips, and her gaze wandered. Kylo Ren wondered if she was so close to death her eyes saw nothing real, but then they snapped back to his face, a sudden mad strength in them.

 

“Don’t tell her the truth,” Tamé said, and there were filaments of yellow in her eyes and a sick power in her voice as she sought to lay a command on him. “Let her be ordinary. Let her be safe.”

 

“I will not tell her the truth,” Kylo said reluctantly, feeling the shackles of the sworn vow settle around him. He would have found a way to break it by the time he overpowered and killed Lord Snoke, but it would certainly be inconvenient in the meantime. Just not as inconvenient as Tamé’s unquiet spirit would be, given her rare talent for spite.

 

There was a faint noise, and Kylo Ren looked up. Hux’s pet trooper, the one he proposed to send through officer training, stood at the periphery of the charred circle in which Tamé lay.

 

“Lord Ren,” PH-5597 said. “Investigative Republic forces are approaching.”

 

“Understood, trooper,” Kylo Ren said.

 

He put his lightsaber through Tamé’s heart and set her bones on fire as he walked away. There would be nothing left for the Republic’s petty policemen to find.

 

And one day soon, when he was in a position to take an apprentice, he would return for Breha and raise her to her rightful place at his side.

 

***

 

“ _Sir. We were unable to acquire the droid on Jakku. It escaped capture aboard a stolen Corellian YT model freighter.”_

 

 _“The droid... stole a freighter?”_  
  
  


_“Not exactly, sir. It had help… We have no confirmation, but we believe FN-2187 may have been helped in the escape--”_

 

_“Anything **else**?”_

 

_“...The two were accompanied by a girl.”_

 

_“ **What girl**?”_

 

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [parfit gentil knyght](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14725392) by [rain_sleet_snow](https://archiveofourown.org/users/rain_sleet_snow/pseuds/rain_sleet_snow)




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